Obituary

To look back on such a complex personality as Norman Elrod and his extensive work can only mean, for me, to pick out one aspect of the many that often struck me in the personal encounter with him and his writings and continues to do so. I am thinking of his understanding of, and his way of dealing with, contradictions, and this on such different levels as everyday life, therapeutic work, and theory of knowledge. A committed psychoanalyst, Elrod was also among other things a historian, a cultural anthropologist, a connoisseur and lover of literature, graphic arts and music, a theatre director, and a philosopher. In all these areas he thought of himself not only as a therapist, artist, and scientist, but always as a teacher as well; this makes it understandable, for example, that he founded an educational and research institute. I myself owe him and his wife Heidi important insights into music history and the comparison of musical interpreters, the result of many Saturday evening listening sessions in their home after a card game. In his pedagogical and therapeutic work, it seemed to me that Elrod frequently encouraged others to take a personal critical position on the learning material and experiences of our time. Entirely in the spirit of the three steps of liberation theology – analysis, interpretation, action (cf. 2:23) – he was concerned to observe and transform the reality in question as broadly and humanely as possible. Elrod (3) was convinced that in this undertaking the “identification with the oppressed” as an unconscious, preconscious, and conscious process can be helpful, not only on ethical grounds, but above all because of the epistemological striving for truth: “When one considers things from the point of view of the oppressed”, Elrod argued,

To look back on such a complex personality as Norman Elrod and his extensive work can only mean, for me, to pick out one aspect of the many that often struck me in the personal encounter with him and his writings and continues to do so. I am thinking of his understanding of, and his way of dealing with, contradictions, and this on such different levels as everyday life, therapeutic work, and theory of knowledge.
A committed psychoanalyst, Elrod was also among other things a historian, a cultural anthropologist, a connoisseur and lover of literature, graphic arts and music, a theatre director, and a philosopher. In all these areas he thought of himself not only as a therapist, artist, and scientist, but always as a teacher as well; this makes it understandable, for example, that he founded an educational and research institute. I myself owe him and his wife Heidi important insights into music history and the comparison of musical interpreters, the result of many Saturday evening listening sessions in their home after a card game.
In his pedagogical and therapeutic work, it seemed to me that Elrod frequently encouraged others to take a personal critical position on the learning material and experiences of our time. Entirely in the spirit of the three steps of liberation theology -analysis, interpretation, action (cf. 2:23) -he was concerned to observe and transform the reality in question as broadly and humanely as possible. Elrod (3) was convinced that in this undertaking the "identification with the oppressed" as an unconscious, preconscious, and conscious process can be helpful, not only on ethical grounds, but above all because of the epistemological striving for truth: "When one considers things from the point of view of the oppressed", Elrod argued, one is often able for the first time to study human beings and psychic reality comprehensively, since what is otherwise excluded in research is included here, and indeed in such a way that it speaks for itself. The identification with the oppressed thus links us with the general, in that the individual, collective, and societal subject levels are placed in an overall relation that makes it very difficult to absolutise particular interests and thus limit our possibilities for knowledge and development (4:338).
It was important to Elrod, as just indicated, to distinguish between individual, collective, and societal subjects. Under the collective and societal subjects he thought "e.g. of families, clubs, working groups, church organisations, multinational concerns, and ultimately socially organised humanity as a whole" (5:258). The unique personality of the individual subject forms itself inter alia out of the mutual relations within and among the three subject levels as a dialectical unity of socialisation and individualisation. Also Elrod's close co-operation with Italy's Democratic Psychiatry and his attempts to render findings of the cultural-historical school of Lev S. Vygotsky fruitful for psychoanalysis (cf. e.g. 6, 3, 7) were rooted in the above-described "turning to the oppressed as a sufferer who needs help" and the effort to achieve a "deeper insight into the nature of the human being" (4:339).
Elrod understood dialectics not only as a particular form of thinking, but also as the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature and society (cf. 8:131-32). He thus showed certain incompatible opposing positions to be societally determined and attributed e.g. the contradiction between individual and society, with certain reservations, to the fact that human beings, especially since the Renaissance, have perceived themselves increasingly as isolated single entities. With the transition to the new socio-economic formation which has influenced our lives decisively world-wide up to the present, we perceive our fellow human beings and the products of our work as detached from us, as foreign to us. Elrod observed repeatedly in his work that this separation persists in the individual's subjectivity and selfexperience.
As Elrod already (9) made clear in his work with seriously disturbed human beings in the "schizophrenic situation", it is sometimes important to let contradictions "stand", or better, operate. First of all, the ill persons must be given a chance to experience themselves in different split-off modes of existence -now as saints, now as whoresbefore perhaps a therapeutic process in the narrower sense of the dialectical "both A and not-A" starts to move and build a "bridge" favouring "a meeting, a concilium, between radically severed opposites" (9:22). In a sense, the dialectic of contradictions can only unfold once the opposites are no longer experienced as altogether irreconcilable. Taking a cue from Nicholas of Cusa (1440-1444) 2 , one might also say: "If the opposites can be experienced as coincided, then ego strength and ego building can arise" (4:339).
In the early 1960s Elrod explained Ludwig Binswanger's (10) concept of "Tragung" -the act of carrying, sustaining, bearing: a "term for the basis which makes therapeutic transferences and counter-transferences possible, endurable, and resolvable" (11:302) -against the background of psychotherapy in the chronic schizophrenic situation: In the asymmetrical therapist-patient relationship there are existential similarities, related features, and in the course of the therapy a kind of mutual sharing of destiny [Binswanger's "Schicksalsverbundenheit"] may arise that can "then be experienced consciously when the unity in the conflict of opposites is perceived and accepted as an element in the psychoanalytic situation" (12:17, cf. 11). And thus the therapeutic relationship leads not only to transferences, but also to sustaining (cf. German tragend) common experiences.
This working out of contradictory positions and ways of existing and being, this letting them stand and operate, characterized Elrod's basic approach to other areas of life as well. The superficial observer might have misinterpreted this at times as a liberalistic attitude, as a striving for a static, conflict-free harmony in the sense of a nondialectical "both A and not-A". But it was just the contrary. Elrod professed a dialectic that he traced back to Heraclitus and which emphasised, as pointed out above, the unity and the conflict of opposites, where conflict means the mutual penetration and modification of the opposites.
When, for example, Elrod pleaded along with Robert S. Wallerstein for "a pluralism of theoretical perspectives" (13:5), for a joint ad-venture in psychoanalysis, he did so out of his profoundly democratic conviction that, as Stephen A. Mitchell stressed, it is only freedom of thought that makes scientific progress possible, not the premature integration of contradictory theories or the inquisitorial exclusion of those who think differently (cf. 14:86). But it is surely useful to put some order into the current confusion of incompatible systems such as instinct theory, ego psychology, object relations theory, etc. and to distinguish the positions clearly from each other, as Charles Rycroft (15), for example, has done in his Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.
Elrod repeatedly pointed out that this kind of contrasting had a tradition in the specific area where he lived and worked, the Lake of Constance-Zurich region. He called attention to such controversial figures as Ludwig Binswanger, Carl Gustav Jung, Medard Boss, and Gion Condrau, who were active there.
In working through different systems of thought, it is characteristic of Elrod that he did not combine Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud eclectically in his theory of knowledge, exactly what Vygotsky strongly criticised in his own colleagues who, for instance, "give an answer to a question posed by the Marxist philosophy which was whispered to them by the Freudian metapsychology" (16:109). No, Elrod (17) agreed with Hans W. Loewald (18), who came to the conclusion in his development of the sublimation concept that Freud's metapsychology requires a thorough investigation. A common main concern of Elrod and Loewald was how to overcome the separation of individual and society, of subject and object, of primary and secondary process (cf. 7). In this endeavour, both again and again discovered profound insights into the collective and societal in Freud, and in Marx, Elrod repeatedly saw an understanding of the individual's uniqueness. Elrod (3) defined "Freud's goad" [Stachel Freud] not as a contradiction between libido and society (see Bernard Görlich et al., 19), but as "Freud's consistent commitment for truth based on knowledge of reality" (3:683).
Elrod frequently called attention to another crucial problem in today's scientific world: In keeping with Aristotle's Metaphysics, research into the unique human individual is seen as a contradiction in se. Science, so we are told, is always science of the general (cf. 20:427). Laws can only be derived from what happens regularly and often. The individual is contingent, without access to any further explanation. In this sense diseases to be investigated by science "are in any case abstract concepts" (21:5). In particular, the representatives of biological psychiatry and the research teams of psychiatric classification systems are active today in a tradition of the science of the general, which tends to regard only "external" experience -grasped through measurement or qualitative description -which can be made conceptually operational as the object of scientific research.
The decisive feature of this form of empiricism seems to be its reductionism. Reductionist simplifications run the danger of leading to a model of reality, which is basically far removed from experience and is thus anything but empirical. Researchers in psychotherapy are only dealing to a limited degree with "reality" when they restrict it to these experimental -possibly too fewbehavioural possibilities or then e.g. already find it modified by a massive application of psychopharmaceuticals.
In the discussion of the position that a science of the unique is impossible and amounts to a formallogical contradiction, Elrod was again helped by his dialectical concrete historical work method and his understanding of phenomenology. He was far from an abstract condemnation of medication in treatment or from rejecting it entirely in everyday clinical life. Much less would he have denied the need for science to uncover general laws. In a work published shortly before his death, Psychotherapie der Schizophrenie [Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia], a review of 50 years as a psychoanalyst and supervisor in psychiatric institutions (22), he did show, however, how indispensable the individual case study remains. Without this, it is impossible to take the individual uniqueness of the human being seriously and to investigate it -in its process of becoming and in that which it ultimately becomes. Ludwig Binswanger (23) regarded Elrod's Zur Phänomenologie der Besserung in der Psychotherapie [On the phenomenology of improvement in psychotherapy] (24), which is reprinted in the just-mentioned work together with post-treatment follow-ups, "as being in the front rank of writings on the psychotherapy with chronic schizophrenics" (23:376).
Elrod was familiar with the motto of Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray: "EVERY MAN is in certain respects a. like all other men, b. like some other men, c. like no other man" (25:53), and I think, looking back, that he was also concerned, by means of a science of the unique, to understand better the developmental context of the unique, the processes and structures, be they of a socioeconomic, societal-and individual-historical, and/or biological nature, which make possible the irreplaceable individual marks of human existence in the first place. That was not only a concern of Marx, who tried to seize "the peculiar logic of the peculiar object" (26:296; cf. 27:261), but also ultimately of Freud when he attempted to derive the uniqueness of the individual from psychodynamic laws.
For the sake of completeness, let me mention that one of the leading representatives of logical positivism, Rudolf Carnap, said: "Recently (in connection with ideas of Dilthey [the epistemologist and hermeneutic thinker, H. R.], Windelband, Rickert), a 'logic of individuality' has repeatedly been demanded . . . (28:23). Carnap believed that his "concept of structure as it occurs in the theory of relations would form a suitable basis for such a method" (28:24). But what is involved here is only "an apparent methodical parallelism between Dilthey's theory of human science and the formalistic structure theory" (29:1437).
Last but not least, Kurt Lewin (30), with his confrontation of Galileian and Aristotelian principles of knowledge, tried to compensate for the undervaluing of the individual case. Aristotle himself saw the greatest difficulty here; he wrote in the Metaphysics: As for the fact that all knowledge is of the universal, so that it is necessary that the principles of the things are also universal and not separated substances, this contains the profoundest problem of all that we have mentioned. Even so, there is a way in which it is true and a way in which it is not. For knowledge is, like indeed knowing, a double thing, being both potential and actual. Now potentiality is like matter. It is universal and indefinite and it is the potentiality of something that is universal and indefinite. But actuality is definite and of something definite, being the this such of a this such. Accidentally, to be sure, sight sees universal, in that the particular colour that it sees is colour, and similarly the object of the grammarian's perusal, this alpha, is alpha. If, then, the principles must be universal, then the things from them must also be universal, as with demonstrative reasoning. But if this is right, then there will not be any separate thing nor any substance.
Perhaps all we can say is this: in a way knowledge is universal, in a way it is not (20:428).
As a researcher on the history of psychotherapy, Elrod pointed out the constructive development of another contradiction: that namely in German Switzerland after World War II the psychotherapy of schizophrenia was the fruit of a co-operation between psychiatry and psychoanalysis -not in the sense of a formal-logical "both A and not-A", but as the unity of mutually penetrating opposites.
I believe that Elrod also wanted to comprehend the scientific debate on explanation and understanding, which is closely related to the question of the possibility of a science of the unique, in the sense of a dialectical "both A and not-A". Elrod would thus probably have been in agreement with his friend Heinz Kohut, who wrote: "While mystical introspection can understand, but not explain, and pre-analytic psychology explains, but does not understand, psychoanalysis explains what it understands" (31:79).
Against this background of Elrod's understanding of and approach to contradictions, I should like to give other examples of his distinctive way of dealing practically and theoretically with matters deemed to be incompatible. As already suggested, he encouraged psychoanalysts not to restrict themselves to private practice, but if possible to work with others in institutions, e.g. the psychiatric clinic. Like Freud before him, he rejected a onesided limitation of psychoanalysis to the medical profession, advocated the "lay analysis", and also valued the therapeutic powers of nursing staff.
Finally, I should mention that Elrod never adhered dogmatically to a dialectic of contradictions. And not at all to the Hegelian one; for that he was too strongly influenced by Sören Kierkegaard as well as by Marx's concrete historical work method, and he also felt certain affinities to the Zen masters. Like Kierkegaard he had above all a sensitivity to the absurd in human life -the paradox that cannot be resolved by reason. It was not by chance that "Dr. Elrod's Theatre Group" performed Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" in the Bellevue Sanatorium and in the cities of Kreuzlingen, Frauenfeld, and St. Gall (32:618). As founder of the "Theatre on the Border" [on the borders of Switzerland and Germany], Elrod directed among other things Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Eugène Ionesco's "The Lesson", all pieces of the theatre of the absurd.
Yes, Elrod could also laugh till he cried over an absurd joke of a Groucho Marx, a Liesl Karlstadt, and a Karl Valentin. Altogether, Norman Elrod will always remain in my memory as a profoundly cheerful, life-affirming human being with a rich sense of humour.  (Langston Hughes 1902-1967: An American poet who went down the thorny path of politics; poetry in English and in German translation), the second-to-last work that he published during his lifetime.

Translated from the German by Charles Edward Brooks
Starting in 1970, Elrod endeavored to cooperate closely with the "Democratic Psychiatry" move-ment in Italy. This cooperation produced 21 articles in the Fogli di Informazione, the official journal of Democratic Psychiatry, and four published volumes of Psychoanalyse im Rahmen der Demokratischen Psychiatrie. In retrospect, the cooperation did not go as Elrod would have wished. In the end, it seemed to Elrod that Democratic Psychiatry treated him with a great deal of skepticism, no less because of his understanding of the New Left in which he completely advocated the position of Sigmund Freud.
In the summer of 2001, Elrod suffered severe heart problems. Thanks to his strong will and the support of his wife, his physician and his friends, he was able to work for another year. He was able to complete his last two works, Langston Hughes and Psychotherapie der Schizophrenie. He worked on the story of Sigmund Freud and the American psychoanalyst Horace Frink up until his last hours of life. Hedi Haffner-Marti, Hans Red and Hartmut Rostek hope to publish this work posthumously in the coming year.
It should be added that the book Psychotherapie der Schizophrenie is a look back at Elrod's 50year-long work as a psychoanalyst and supervisor in psychiatric institutions, and it therefore gives interested readers deep insights into Elrod's research activities and career that this short summary can by no means provide.